Free EMR Newsletter Want to receive the latest news on EMR, Meaningful Use,
ARRA and Healthcare IT sent straight to your email? Join thousands of healthcare pros who subscribe to EMR and HIPAA for FREE!!

Email Address:

We never sell or give out your contact information.
We respect our readers' privacy.

John Lynn is the Founder of the HealthcareScene.com blog network which currently consists of 10 blogs containing over 8000 articles with John having written over 4000 of the articles himself. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 16 million times. John also manages Healthcare IT Central and Healthcare IT Today, the leading career Health IT job board and blog. John is co-founder of InfluentialNetworks.com and Physia.com. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can also be found on Twitter: @techguy and @ehrandhit and LinkedIn.

In a recent McAfee Labs Threats Report, they said that “On average, a company detects 17 data loss incidents per day.” That stat is almost too hard to comprehend. No doubt it makes HIPAA compliance officers’ heads spin.

What’s even more disturbing from a healthcare perspective is that the report identifies hospitals as the easy targets for ransomware and that the attacks are relatively unsophisticated. Plus, one of the biggest healthcare security vulnerabilities is legacy systems. This is no surprise to me since I know so many healthcare organizations that set aside, forget about, or de-prioritize security when it comes to legacy systems. Legacy system security is the ticking time bomb of HIPAA compliance for most healthcare organizations.

In a recent EHR archiving infographic and archival whitepaper, Galen Healthcare Solutions highlighted that “50% of health systems are projected to be on second-generation technology by 2020.” From a technology perspective, we’re all saying that it’s about time we shift to next generation technology in healthcare. However, from a security and privacy perspective, this move is really scary. This means that 50% of health systems are going to have to secure legacy healthcare technology. If you take into account smaller IT systems, 100% of health systems have to manage (and secure) legacy technology.

Unlike other industries where you can decommission legacy systems, the same is not true in healthcare where Federal and State laws require retention of health data for lengthy periods of time. Galen Healthcare Solutions’ infographic offered this great chart to illustrate the legacy healthcare system retention requirements across the country:

Every healthcare CIO better have a solid strategy for how they’re going to deal with legacy EHR and other health IT systems. This includes ensuring easy access to legacy data along with ensuring that the legacy system is secure.

While many health systems use to leave their legacy systems running off in the corner of their data center or a random desk in their hospital, I’m seeing more and more healthcare organizations consolidating their EHR and health IT systems into some sort of healthcare data archive. Galen Healthcare Solution has put together this really impressive whitepaper that dives into all the details associated with healthcare data archives.

There are a lot of advantages to healthcare data archives. It retains the data to meet record retention laws, provides easy access to the data by end users, and simplifies the security process since you then only have to secure one health data archive instead of multiple legacy systems. While some think that EHR data archiving is expensive, it turns out that the ROI is much better than you’d expect when you factor in the maintenance costs associated with legacy systems together with the security risks associated with these outdated systems and other compliance and access issues that come with legacy systems.

I have no doubt that as EHR vendors and health IT systems continue consolidating, we’re going to have an explosion of legacy EHR systems that need to be managed and dealt with by every healthcare organization. Those organizations that treat this lightly will likely pay the price when their legacy systems are breached and their organization is stuck in the news for all the wrong reasons.

Free EMR Newsletter Want to receive the latest news on EMR, Meaningful Use,
ARRA and Healthcare IT sent straight to your email? Join thousands of healthcare pros who subscribe to EMR and HIPAA for FREE!

Email Address:

We never sell or give out your contact information. We respect our readers' privacy.